The stereotypical doll-like women that populate Mike Vaughan's paintings recall the sensuously obsessive images in the work of the French painter Balthus. The chromatic primary colour and simplified form bring to mind something of the style of the west-coast brand of Pop Art. Undeniable also is the influence of this painter's contemporaries, such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud, with whom he worked and exhibited in his native England.

Michael Vaughan had a distinguished teaching career at the Royal College of Art and at Oxford University among other institutions, before arriving in this country over a decade ago. After several years in the Los Angeles area, Vaughan and his wife Lisa moved to Lady's Island, South Carolina. For all his accomplishments Mike Vaughan fits very unobtrusively into the local motif of artist from elsewhere.

The paintings are formally straightforward. The colour and compositions are highly structured and seem carefully balanced, the paint is thinly applied in brushy layers, and most mixing seems to occur on the canvas. Vaughan uses an intriguingly narrow vocabulary of shapes, geometric and amorphous, which, with his distinctive palette, form his peculiar world of cartoon unreality. The yellow form of a cloud is identical in size, shape and colour to a nearby woman's hair. The ubiquitous round fruit rhymes with stylized round trees, hills are breast-shaped, and forms are allowed to merge with their surroundings. There are dramatic shifts of scale, perspectives are forced and even inverted, and patterns, simple stripes or polka dots, are effectively repeated as a formal device and also as a sly means of comparison.

The protagnonist in all these narratives is a young woman. Her typical dress is a kind of Dorothy outfit but with a short skirt cut well above the knee, and sheer seamed stockings, and black patent leather Mary Janes . . . She is sometimes multiplied into a group and blithely lounging in various positions of repose, attending to hair and make-up . . . She again takes on a spiritually symbolic role in Domestic Crucifixion, where she, apparently as a housewife, endures a mild crucifixion, her left hand nailed to a wall and her head on a pillow. She stands like a martyr, seemingly at ease, able to withstand this and other tortures due to some unknown state of grace? Or perhaps that glint in the left side of her face indicates she is not real - that she is instead a doll, perhaps an object of faith, a devotional statue . . .

It seems that Vaughan has imbued his heroine with several female archetypes - the shallow Barbie, slave to consumerism, the housewife as martyr, the innocent and vulnerable maiden, and the unlikely saviour - with which to reconcile these great enigmas of human life: namely religion, sex and death. The image of Barbie comes charged with controversy. She is, on the one hand, treated with disdain because of the shallow yet unattainable feminine ideal she represents, and yet, on the other hand, that ideal is still pursued with enthusiasm. Perhaps there can be no real female emancipation until the death of Barbie, bue Barbie lives on . . . In Death and the Maiden she sees death as her own images in a mirror - she is the cause of her own demise; her crime is lethargy, her disengagement from the perils and pleasures of life.

Vaughan seems to be a man both enthralled and overwhelmed by his vision . . . How Mike Vaughan, the man, views God, women, sex and death is ultimately unimportant. Mike Vaughan the artist has given us unlikely situations, their gravity tempered with humour, on which to project ourselves and to contemplate our own mortality, sensuality and spirituality.
Review by Cabell Heyward
Michael Vaughan in the Image of Women